Posts Tagged ‘Dishonored’

The Dishonored video bombardment will leave nothing standing. Eventually all that will remain of former gaming websites will be a flickering screen and a hyperlink pointing at digital vendors of Bethesda’s next big game. The latest salvo attempts to define that most nebulous of game design concepts: immersion. The key devs on the project show up in this ten-minute mini-documentary to discuss how this concept relates to industrial design, the non-photorealistic art style, and weird alt-not-London that they’re trying to express. There’s a tonne of stuff on the architecture, of course, and it’s inevitably full of lavish new glimpses the Dishonored world, too.

Dishonored hardly needs a bigger sell from Bethesda, but this dev diary, featuring Raf Colantonio, Harvey Smith, Viktor Antonov and others, is certainly convincing. They talk about all the aspects we’ve heard before – the complex mechanics, the exquisite world design, the fiction – but more than the words are the in-game scenes that go with it, showing some aspects of the game we’ve not seen much of before, such as you interaction with numerous NPCs, and your escape from prison at the start of the game. I’m fairly certain this is going to be breath-taking, and roll on October. (Not that I don’t have enough to play in the meantime.)Read the rest of this entry »

I fully endorse the idea of advertising videogames with other videogames – especially when it’s done cleverly, ala Borderlands 2’s recent 2D demake. I mean, it’s sort of the logical conclusion to these things, right? Who wants to look at screenshots or watch a trailer when they can clomp through a world on their own three WASD fingers? And hey, Dishonored‘s looking incredible. Really, is there a more natural fit? That brings us to Dishonored: Revenge At Hand, which is… a game about watching trailers. Huh. And so, in this version of Dishonored’s honor, I have decided to revive my “Oops, I broke Dishonored” series.

I know there’s an entire army of your screwing up your eyes and refusing to look at another jot of Dishonored coverage until it arrives in October, but for those not yet convinced there’s still more to be seen. The latest game footage trailer (below) lays out a chunk of stealth business, which is something trailers seem to ignore when they are dealing with stealth games. Not so here, as you can observe from this. And that bit with the candle at 0.58 is really neat. I had not seen that before.

At last week’s German mega-convention, GamesCom, I sat down for the second time to play Dishonored. This game of stealth, magic, and assassination will be one of the handful of truly important games in 2012, and whether or not it is entirely a success, its release and development will have been an important event in game design history. Read on for more thoughts on why that is, as well as words from the game’s co-lead, Arkane creative boss Raf Colantonio, who I spoke to after my most recent session at the controls of super-assassin Corvo Atano.

I’m in love with Dishonored – or at least, what I’ve gotten to play of it at various press events and things. Torrid, disgusting, fluid-filled love. And QuakeCon’s demo, which saw me infiltrate a fancy mansion party to assassinate one of three “Lady Boyles” (only one of whom was my real target) might actually be my favorite section yet. Co-creative directors Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio, however, have gone on at length about how much they love it when players break their game and pull off supernatural stunts they couldn’t even conceive. So, after already sinking a few hours into repeat playthroughs, I sat down at my trusty demo station with a mission: ruin everything. Test boundaries. Push limits. Become the world’s foremost expert on Jello mold physics. And gosh, it was really, really fun.

Following on from the “Daring Escapes” trailer, Dishonored shows off more game-footage with “Creative Kills”. This time we get to see a wide range of uses for Dishonored various powers, all of them pertaining to the dispatching of enemies. Ugly business. But what’a pretty game. And I get to play more of it at GamesCom next week. It’s a hard life.Read the rest of this entry »

It won’t be long before I’m the only member of RPS who hasn’t played Dishonored, which is surely due to some form of dire cosmic plot against me. I’m not going to spend the next few months tugging at Alec’s sleeve and asking, over and over again, “but how good was it?” or calling Jim in the wee small hours of the morning and asking, “will it satisfy my every desire?”. Instead of gathering every last remaining scrap of knowledge that falls from their brain-pans, I’ve decided to impose a media blackout on myself. I’ll be the one who goes in knowing the least and that’ll make the experience all the sweeter. But then I remembered that it’s my job to look at every picture and video of every game. Here are some new screens.

Blimey, this is a cast and a half. Let’s just plunge right in: Susan Sarandon will be playing, er, “Granny Rags”, while the extraordinary Brad Dourif makes mouth noises for inventor Piero, creator of that scary mask worn by the game’s protagonist, Corvo. Slightly more bizarrely, Bethesda inform us that Carrie Fisher “can be heard broadcasting government propaganda over loudspeakers throughout the city of Dunwall, where the game is set.”

Then there’s John “Mad Men” Slattery as Admiral Havelock, and Michael “All Those Movies” Madsen as Daud, a mysterious assassin. Also: Chloë Grace Moretz from Kick-Ass playing “young Lady Emily”, while the incalculably lovely Lena Headey joins the cast as Calista, Emily’s caretaker.

Also the chap who does the score for Dexter, Daniel Licht, is doing the music. Strong.

We had thought Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed III six separate releases was confusing. The plans for the game everyone at RPS is most excited to play this year, Dishonored, now makes that move look positively bland. In a display of eye-rolling pre-order bonus alchemy, Bethesda have announced a divisive and flat-out bizarre set of retailer-dependent exclusives. It takes the form of a handy guide for publishers to see exactly how they shouldn’t promote a game, as you can see below.

We’ve already begun to talk at length about the variety of options that Dishonored will present us with, and the trailers have begun to back up that analysis. The latest one, which you can see below, shows off this with a clever choose-your-own path thing, demonstrating how the short range teleportation, possession, and time-bending powers come into play when getting out of unpleasant circumstances.

I am a creature of mercy. No, no, ignore any apparent evidence to the contrary – I do not seek to take life, even virtual life, unless absolutely necessary. So it was that, when my time finally came to play a level of Arkane’s upcoming Dishonored, I was resolute in my intention to spill not even a drop of blood, innocent or otherwise. But would such quasi-pacifism even be possible in a game nominally billed as an assassination sim? I stole into the shadows to find out. If you are mad you might decide to think that some of this constitutes spoilers. It doesn’t, but if you are mad don’t read on.Read the rest of this entry »